The Case of the Dirty Bird (5 page)

A sudden clunking sound froze both of them. Dunc turned the light off, and they stood listening, holding their breaths.

There was no repeat of the sound.

“It was a cat,” Dunc said.

“Or a rat,” Amos said. “As big as a rhino, except that it eats meat. Human flesh. And it’s hungry.” Amos stopped as he realized he was alone again. “Dunc?”

“Over here.” Dunc was moving along the wall, and he held his hand over the light again, letting a tiny stream out. “I’m looking for a tunnel or door. The back of the building is against the stone of the river-bank.”

They felt along the wall, tapping, but there was no opening except for the doorway leading to the basement.

“Maybe it’s downstairs,” Dunc whispered. “And we missed it.”

He moved back down the steps and was halfway down when Amos landed on him in a heap that sent both of them tumbling down to the bottom.

“Missed a step,” Amos whispered as they untangled themselves. “I was doing all right until that third one. My foot slid over it at a slight angle, and my body weight was past center. I still almost controlled it, but then the main mass of weight caught up and—”

“Amos.”

“Right, it doesn’t matter. Be quiet. Got it.”

“You work one way, I’ll work the other.” Dunc felt along the wall to the left, and Amos worked to the right. In moments they were back to the stairway.

“Nothing,” Dunc said.

“Just rocks and crumbling cement,” Amos said. “No tunnels.”

“Maybe,” Dunc said, “there’s a secret passage and a hidden latch that makes a door swing open.”

Amos snorted. “Only in movies.”

“Then that means there isn’t a tunnel.” Dunc’s voice had a final flatness.

“Yes, well, I told you not to believe a dirty bird.”

“So we can go.”

“Good. Light my way across the basement so I don’t hit that rake again. I’m afraid of that rake.”

“How about under the stairs?” Dunc asked suddenly. “What did you find there?”

“That was in your half.”

“I thought it was in yours. Come on, let’s check it.”

Dunc crawled beneath the stairway and halfway back the sliver of light caught it.

There, so low that a person would have to stoop well over to get through it, was a small doorway set into the rock and concrete wall.

Amos kneeled next to Dunc. “Is it locked?”

“Just a wooden peg through a hasp.” Dunc lifted the peg out and opened the door.

To his surprise, the door swung open easily.

And silently.

He moved the shaft of light to the hinges. “Look—they’ve been oiled. Just like the hinges upstairs.”

“So what?”

“So somebody had to come and do that—they must have had a reason.”

“So we go home?”

Dunc snorted. “Not likely. Not now that we’ve found something.”

He pulled the wooden peg and opened the door, crouched down, and crawled in. Amos held for a moment, but the basement was pitch black without the sliver of light from the flashlight, and he kneeled and followed Dunc.

“Close the door,” Dunc said, “and I’ll turn the flashlight on full.”

Amos closed the door, and Dunc took his hand off the light.

The sudden brightness was blinding, and both boys closed their eyes for a second.

“Oh, man, look at this.” Dunc opened his eyes and swept the light in front of them. It disappeared down a long tube of darkness.

“It’s a tunnel.” Amos tried to see the end of it and couldn’t. “It must go on forever.”

“Just like the parrot said.” Dunc flashed the light down and back up, trying to see the end, but the light didn’t penetrate far enough.

“I wonder what it was for?”

“Maybe they dug it out for a storeroom or something.”

“It’s pretty long for a storeroom.”

“Who knows? All I know is that it’s a tunnel like the bird said, and we’ve got a shot at buried treasure.”

“Maybe it’s an old mine,” Amos said. “Maybe it goes to the center of the earth.”

“It doesn’t matter. We go in eight paces and start digging for treasure.”

“Tools,” Amos said. “We don’t have any tools.”

“Oh—that’s right. How about in the basement? Weren’t there some tools there?”

“A rake—that I know about for sure. But I didn’t see a shovel.”

“Let’s go look.”

He made a step, and there was a clunking noise from outside and above the tunnel entrance.

“What was that?” Amos said.

“Like before—it was just a rat or cat or something.”

There was another thump, then the sound of something being dragged across the floor upstairs, then a thumping as if a heavy weight were being brought down the steps one step at a time.

And then, distinctly, the boys heard a man’s voice say:

“I don’t care how much we make, I think we should find something lighter than appliances to steal—they barely fit through the door into the tunnel.”

“Smuggle,” a second man said. “We don’t steal—we’re smuggling.”

Dunc and Amos stood frozen, but Amos broke first.

“Run!” he yelped at Dunc and ran directly over him, headed down the length of the tunnel.

Dunc had caught up in three jumps and was passing Amos when Amos squeaked:

“The light, kill the light!”

Dunc flipped the switch, and the results were disaster. The two of them were running wide open and went suddenly from bright light to total pitch darkness. Amos went down like an oak, stepping on his own feet, and Dunc fell over him.

“Flick it,” Amos whispered. “Flick the light so we can see what we’re doing.”

Dunc flashed the light, and they were up and running again. He kept flashing it until it showed a side tunnel, smaller than the main run, going off to the right.

“In here!” Dunc swung to the right and Amos bounced off the corner and followed. Just around the corner Dunc stopped. There was another wall with a door, this one slightly larger than the first, but closed. Or it seemed closed at first. There was a crack on the left side, and Dunc tried it.

“Stuck.”

“Be quiet,” Amos whispered. “They’re coming in the tunnel.”

Dunc turned off the light again, and the two boys stood silently in the darkness. There was more bumping and cursing, and then a light came down the tunnel, past them, from the doorway.

“Isn’t there some better place to store these things while we’re waiting to take a load out?” the first man asked.

“I told you—nobody will bother anything here. We need a safe place because it takes so long to get a full load. Now quit griping, and help me.”

There was more grunting and cursing. The sound carried well down the tunnel.

“There. Let’s get out of here. This place makes my hair stand on end.”

“Why? It’s just an old powder storage tunnel from the Civil War. They needed a cool, dry place for cannon powder while they were waiting to ship it. Hey, just like us—waiting to ship.”

“I still don’t like it. It’s dark, and there may be spiders.”

“All right, all right. Let’s go—there’s that color television set to pick up yet.”

“You think it’s safe to go back to the same house?”

“Oh, sure. They’re on vacation. We can clean the whole place out. Then we load the truck and take it downstate and sell it at flea markets, just like last time.”

“Last time you traded the whole load for old telephone line insulators.”

“An investment, my friend. You’ll see. Now come on—wait a minute, what’s that?”

“What’s what?”

“There. Those are tracks heading off down the tunnel. See them in that soft dirt and dust?”

“Tracks?”

“I
told
you I left the peg in the hasp.
Somebody took it out, and they’re still in here.”

Dunc poked Amos, leaned close to his ear. “Get ready. We have to go through this door. It’s our only chance.” He pulled Amos up.

The voices came down the tunnel again.

“How do you know they’re still here?”

“There’s two sets of tracks and they only go one way—they don’t come back. And there’s no way out of the tunnel. Come on, we’ve got to find them.”

“Oh, come on—they’re probably gone. You don’t know that there’s no other way out. You just walked back a little ways.”

“That doesn’t matter. I’m not letting anybody steal my stolen appliances.”

Dunc leaned close to Amos again and whispered barely loud enough to make a whushing sound. “Ready?”

Amos hesitated. “Well, as a matter of fact—”

“Now!”

Dunc pulled at the door. This time the hinges had not been oiled. The door opened, but with a sound like fingers being dragged
down a blackboard. It made a slot wide enough for the two boys, and they wiggled through just as they heard from the tunnel:

“There they are! Come on—let’s get ’em!”

Dunc stopped just past the door, and Amos ran into him.

“What the—”

“It’s a storage room.” Dunc flashed the light around. There were barrels and boxes stacked up both sides of the tunnel.

“Let’s
go
!” Amos shouted. “They’re coming.”

“It’s powder,” Dunc said. “Gunpowder from years ago.”

“We have to get going!” Amos dragged him and headed on through the tunnel. “There has to be another way out of here.”

“All that powder, all these years.” Dunc
followed, and inside forty feet they came to another wooden wall with a narrow door. This door was closed, but Amos got his fingers into the edge and jerked it open, and Dunc and he piled through. Amos closed the door and looked to see Dunc flashing the light.

“It’s no good,” Dunc said. “It’s a dead end.”

“No—it can’t be.”

“It is.” Dunc lifted the light. “See? It goes back a little and stops dead.”

“What about there—on the side? See it? That low hole?”

Dunc moved the light down and to the right.

There was a small hole—not over three feet in diameter—going off to the side.

They heard a screech as the two men opened the first door on the powder storage room.

“Go for it,” Amos said. “We’re out of time.”

Dunc dived into the small hole, and Amos followed.

Only to be stopped dead in ten feet.

“That’s it,” Dunc said, squirming around. “It ends here—they must have done it to explore a new tunnel and then dropped it.”

“We’re dead.” Amos turned and crouched on all fours. “They’ve got us.”

Dunc said nothing. They held their breath, waiting.

There was a long pause, then they heard:

“My flashlight bulb blew—coming through the door.”

“Where are we?”

“I don’t know, some sort of room. I’ve never been in here before, and I didn’t see anything before the bulb went.”

“Well, keep going—they can’t be that far ahead of us.”

“I can’t. It’s pitch dark in here.”

“Wait—I’ll light a match, and then you go ahead.”

“Oh, oh,” Amos whispered. “This isn’t good, is it?”

The boys heard the scratch of a match, once, twice, then a small whuffing sound as it lit.

“Blow it out!” the other man yelled. “Blow it out! It’s pow—”

Which was as far as he got before the powder, stored for 130 years, decided to take over.

There was a huge, deafening barfing sound, a light like fifteen or twenty thousand flashbulbs going off, and Amos and Dunc were driven to the end of the small side tunnel like two corks in a bottle.